Hello everyone! I’m delighted to be kicking off the next wallpaper selection process for the 13.10 release of Ubuntu coming this October. As you can see from the Saucy Salamander release schedule, we hit UI freeze on August 29th of this year and we’d like to get all your lovely community submitted images ready before then. To get involved submit your images to the Flickr group for submissions.

I’ve also made the above short video to encourage new people to get involved, share it around as hopefully it’s a good intro to the process and if you have ideas or comments then let me know, I can make additional ones as we go.

With some help from designers in Canonical we’ve come up with the following tips for creating wallpapers images.

Images shouldn’t be busy and filled with too many shapes and colours, a similar tone throughout is a good rule of thumb.

A single point of focus, a single area that draws the eye into the image, can also help you avoid something too cluttered.

The left and top edges are home to Ubuntu’s Launcher and Panel so be careful to consider how your images look in place so as not to clash with the interface.

Try your image at different aspect ratios to make sure something important isn’t cropped out on smaller/ larger screens at different resolutions.

Take a look at the wallpapers guidance on the Ubuntu Wiki regarding the size of images. Our minimum resolution is 2560 x 1600.

To shortlist from this collection we’ll be going to the contributors whose images were selected last time around to act as our selection judges. In doing this we’ll hold a series of public IRC meetings on Freenode in #1310wallpaper to discuss the selection. In those sessions we’ll get the selection team to try out the images on their own Ubuntu machines to see what they look like on a range of displays and resolutions.

Anyone is welcome to come to these sessions but please keep in mind that an outcome is needed from the time that people are volunteering and there’s usually a lot of images to get through so we’d appreciate it if there isn’t too much additional debate.

So, to get this show on the road here’s the outline for this cycle.

12/07/13 – Kick off 13.10 wallpaper submission process

23/07/13 – First get together on #1310wallpaper at 19:30 GMT

16/08/13 – Submissions deadline at 18:00 GMT – Flickr group will be locked and the selection process will begin

As always, ping me if you have any questions, I’ll be lurking in #1310wallpaper on freenode or leave a question in the Flickr group for wider discussion, that’s probably the fastest way to get an answer to a question.

I’ll be posting updates on our schedule here from time to time but the Flickr group will serve as our hub.

Happy snapping and scribbling and on behalf of the community, thanks for contributing to Ubuntu!

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